Distressed Mom of Missing Teen Prompted Local Diver to Search for the Boy’s Body. Now He’s Found 14 Others

In March 2024, Juan Heredia saw a parent’s desperate plea about their teenage son and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Fifteen-year-old Xavier Martinez had made a split-second decision that turned tragic: he jumped into the Calaveras River beside his high school in Stockton, California, and never surfaced.

Rescue teams searched the river for six days with no success. Xavier’s mother, Amanda Martinez, went on local news asking for help. Watching the story, Heredia — along with his daughter Camila, who had attended school in the same district as Xavier — drove to the spot where the boy disappeared. There, they met Amanda in person.

Heredia, 53, spends his weekdays as a former general contractor and house-flipper. But he also happens to be a certified diver and scuba instructor who grew up in Argentina learning to move through dark, silty river water. As a kid, he’d dive in to retrieve dropped fishing hooks because replacing them wasn’t easy for his family.

When Heredia spoke with Amanda last year, she shared a strong feeling: she believed her son was underwater, near the shade of a tree.

Heredia entered the river, and almost immediately found Xavier exactly where she said. The boy was lying calmly below the surface — head angled toward the sunlight, hands held together as if in prayer.

“He was like an angel,” Heredia says softly. “Something I never expected to see.”

Amanda was stunned. “It was just so mind-blowing,” the 39-year-old says. “How can someone find my son in 30 minutes when it’s been six days?”

The city of Stockton soon honored Heredia with a key to the city, naming him a hero. After that, more calls began coming — families who felt they had nowhere left to turn.

“I felt the need of the community,” he says. So he went back into the water again and again.

Less than two years later, Heredia has recovered 15 people at 10 different sites across California and Oregon — infants, siblings, friends, parents, and children. Each time, he gives families the one thing they have been aching for: certainty.

Most recently, he helped retrieve a 7-year-old girl who vanished near Big Sur, California, after authorities said she and her father were swept into the ocean. Her family had been visiting from Canada, traveling with her surviving mother and 2-year-old sibling.

Heredia calls the work “bittersweet.” The dives bring closure, but the weight arrives later. “The night after is when it’s hard for me to sleep. That’s the worst part,” he says.

Underwater, though, his mind narrows to a single purpose. “In that moment,” he explains, “I have one mission — finding the son or that daughter.”

In July, he stepped away from construction and real estate to focus full-time on his nonprofit, Angels Recovery Dive Team. The effort is a family mission. His wife Mercedes and his children from a previous marriage — Camila, 22, and Matias, 24 — are all divers who support him. He never charges for his work, relying only on donations.

“I remember every single name and every single place of every single son and daughter I’ve found,” he says.

One of the people who reached out was Matt Bowman, who calls Heredia “a balm in an otherwise terrible moment.”

Bowman was frantic in June after three friends — Matt Anthony, Matt Schoenecker, and Val Creus — disappeared into Rattlesnake Falls. The second and third men had tried to save the first, and all three were lost in the violent currents. The area was remote and treacherous. Search teams struggled to even access the water.

Bowman says nine professional divers evaluated the falls and decided it was too dangerous to reach the bottom.

Heredia didn’t agree. Even with an injured ankle, he hiked through rain and hail to the site and went in. He dove repeatedly, sometimes for more than three minutes at a time without an oxygen tank.

When he found the three friends, he told Bowman they were still together. Despite the chaos above, the water around them was still — even the shirt Matt Anthony wore wasn’t shifting.

“His combination of courage, devotion and faith made it possible,” Bowman says. “He thinks with a mother’s heart. And if there has to be a funeral, he aims for an open casket so families can have some peace.”

Heredia’s approach is deeply personal. He doesn’t speak about “bodies,” Bowman adds. He calls every person by their first name.

Loss has also shaped Heredia’s own home. His blended family has lived through tragedy: Mercedes, 52, a mortgage loan officer with three children of her own, lost her son Brian, 20, in 2023. His car went into a canal, and he drowned.

Heredia is often asked which recovery affected him most. For a long time, he said it was finding very young children, like 2-year-old Dane Paulsen in Oregon — holding the toddler until the coroner arrived.

But in August, a call changed that. He was asked to help locate Whisper Owen and her 8-month-old daughter Sandra, believed to have crashed in the same area where Brian died.

“It was the same place where Brian’s car went down,” Heredia says.

As Mercedes knelt near her son’s riverside memorial, Heredia and rescuers recovered Owen’s vehicle from the water, with mother and baby still inside.

“Everybody stopped. Nobody talked. It was like the world stopped,” he says.

For Heredia, the moment reinforced what drives him: ending the unbearable uncertainty that families live with after sudden loss — and reminding them they don’t have to face that darkness alone.

“Every time I recover somebody,” he says, “they become part of my family.”